Another Critique of Judgment

Aesthetic judgment is at least partially separate from the idea of taste.

Taste refers to the reception of a stimulus, the sensation it illicits, and its immediate bodily acceptance or rejection.  Taste has to do with biology, for the most part it is "natural," if by natural we mean immediately known, consciously pondered as briefly as possible, to the point that it seems that no thought is given to such a decision.

Aesthetics, or at least what aesthetics has become, is the contemplation of what kind of sensation should be the result of any such stimulus.  It has more to do with sociology and psychology, in that aesthetic decisions are made based not only on immediate sensation, but through a filtering of the perceived personal and social implications involved with (dis)liking something. It may be that Aesthetics rests fully in the Symbolic order, while taste is more 'Real,' in a Lacanian sense.

There are times of conflation (a type of honesty, perhaps) when taste and aesthetics overlap. The easiest example to help explain this is food.  Essentially every young person likes the way sugar tastes, thus it is in good taste to have candies and confections.  At this time, taste and aesthetics coincide.  As people get older, the social and personal pressures of body image and health, and all the rules that come with it, may alter their aesthetic decisions of sweets, to the point where they no longer like them. Of course, this example can be made infinitely more complicated by slightly increasing the complexity of the situation.

Now the question remains, what is the nature of this alienation? Is there more truth in the aesthetic judgment or the taste judgment?  Is the most truth arrived at when taste and aesthetics overlap? (Is there any truth at all or just fleeting thoughts/feelings?)

{Lame conclusion: I think both are important in their own right, and the real importance is in reinstating (or implementing) the difference in these two words, so that when critiquing a work of art (or anything), one can distinguish between the guttural/emotional response and the intellectual response.}